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What Time* Got Wrong About the Pope

(*And a lot of other people too.)

By CANDIDA MOSS

December 11, 2013

What really sets Francis apart from his most recent predecessors, though, is that he has been treated with suspicion and outright disdain by right-wing media pundits and fiscal conservatives. After Francis wrote a critique of capitalism that emphasized income inequality, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh styled him some kind of radical Marxist bent on destroying free markets; Stuart Varney of Fox News said the pope should stick to religion and stay out of politics. The conservative website WorldNetDaily claimed that Francis has ties to the KGB and makes “Jesus weep in heaven.” Dark mutterings about assassination plots in retaliation for Francis’s campaign against church corruption have bolstered the sense that this pope is taking on entrenched foes, and making enemies among the right has only further endeared him to those on the left.

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But the buzz that has greeted Pope Francis’s advocacy for the poor against the powerful exaggerates its novelty. And it’s certainly not a rejection of church doctrine: It goes back to Jesus and has been a dominant feature of Catholic social teaching since the very beginning. Francis may be the most photographed priest to adhere to his vows of poverty, but he’s far from the first.

In fact, we have yet to see the kinds of doctrinal tinkering the media has attributed to him. When it comes to the hot-button cultural issues that animate the Rush Limbaughs of the world, nothing has changed. Francis has been clear that the church’s position on abortion is not up for discussion, and he recently excommunicated Father Greg Reynolds of Melbourne, Australia, presumably for officiating at unsanctioned gay marriages. This pope may be extraordinarily compassionate, but he still enforces church order.

Where Francis has been most antagonistic has been in his statements about liturgy and hierarchy. In his headline-making Apostolic Exhortation, an official letter to the church, released two weeks ago, for example, he took a few swipes at those who are “ostentatious[ly] preoccupied” with doctrine, liturgy and prestige without an appropriate concern for how the gospel affects people’s lives—a jab at traditional Catholics who had criticized him for altering the liturgy. To them, Francis responded: You’re hung up on the bells and whistles, and missing what truly matters. Intra-church scuffles over liturgical innovation aren’t why Francis was nominated for Person of the Year, however.

“What makes this Pope so important is the speed with which he has captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on hoping for the church at all,” Time wrote in its cover story this week. And that is true. But less than a year into his papacy, it certainly seems premature to argue that he “may have found a way out of the 20th century culture wars, which have left the church moribund in much of Western Europe and on the defensive from Dublin to Los Angeles.” The heady romance between Pope Francis and the world is still in its honeymoon period. Francis may turn out to be the religious revolutionary that Time magazine fell in love with and that right-wing pundits fear—but it is too soon to say. Perhaps the media should take a step back, take some time and get to know him.

Candida Moss is professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame.